Interview With Steve Ely

Steve Ely is an English poet who writes about America. In doing so, he seems to interest people who wouldn’t ordinarily be all that interested in contemporary English poetry. For the interested reader, Steve’s excellent poem sequence JerUSAlem is a fine place to start – it explores the American century through it’s margins and footnotes, and can be found scattered around the web (“The Visions of Vicki Weaver”, from JerUSAlem was published in Geometer earlier this year – you can find that poem and links to all the other parts at this link). Despite having written some pretty outstanding stuff, Steve remains little published – perhaps in part due to the fact that his subjects (Sammy Davis Junior, white supremacists, prison gangs) and style (an epic poetry which owes as much to Elmore Leonard as it does to Eliot or Ezra Pound) are not the what you would expect to find in your average contemporary English poetry collection. Having devoured JerUSAlem and found ourselves wanting more, Geometer asked Steve if he’d agree to be interviewed by email, and he kindly agreed:

_

GEOMETER: I think that what first impressed me about JerUSAlem was, here was an attempt to write a poem that engaged with something quite different from the subjects one most commonly associates with contemporary (admittedly, predominantly lyric) poetry – for instance ‘the self’, the relaying of significant ‘experience’, our relations with significant others. Instead there is an attempt to engage with history, or at least, the contemporary mythologising of it, something which has generally been the preserve of prose. Perhaps you could explain what motivates the poem, and how you have sought to realise its ambitions?

STEVE ELY: I agree that much contemporary poetry in English is characterised by a conventional bourgeois narcissism and a corresponding poverty of vision. Read any of the ‘major’ English poetry publishing journals to confirm this; page after page of small, perfect, forms, on worthy yet hackneyed themes and generally provoking (despite their often considerable formal and linguistic virtues) a massive ‘so what?’ – we know the sunsets are Big Sur are stunning, we all wish we’d reconciled with our Fathers before they died, etc, etc. I think this state of affairs is related to the current state of the market for poetry in England. Generally speaking, the only people that read/buy poetry in England are other poets, checking out the competition or learning how to conform their style to something that will be accepted by the editors of Ambit, Poetry London, Faber, Bloodaxe, etc. And what is the thing that will be accepted, the thing that encouraging rejections, poetry competitions and creative writing courses encourage aspiring poets to write? Small, perfect, occasional pieces, about the sunset at Big Sur and relationships with ‘Father’ … It’s a kind of stylised conservatism that militates against experiment, ambition and scale. Of course, people have been making similar criticisms of English poetry for donkey’s years – perhaps it will never change.

I wrote JerUSAlem because I thought I had something important and true to say about the world. I attended a creative writing course once and was advised by one of the tutors to write about my own life, my own experience, on the grounds of that’s what I knew best and thus what I could write about most successfully. I nodded compliantly at the time, but I knew his advice was tendentious. (I’ve actually written a poem about this experience, fancy THAT, in my latest unpublished book, the compleat eater.) Although there is more than a touch of the sublime egotist about me, I’m not so much interested in myself as the world in which I live and try to make sense of.

JerUSAlem has several roots. One is to be found in a reaction to the callow anti-Americanism of leftists and liberals that coalesced and found a rallying point in 2002/3 around the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Another root was my obsessive research into various American ‘underbellies’ – conspiracy theories, supermax prisons, the mafia, racism, Christian Identity, Mormonism, the extreme right and an inchoate feeling that these areas were somehow significant historically and culturally. A third was my own personal experience of the decent, dignified, industrious, respectful, and optimistic citizens of middle America. Another important root was the life and career of Sammy Davis Junior and his successful struggle to make it as a superstar against a context of persistent humiliating racism. Finally, some work on nineteenth century American history turned me on to the Bill of Rights and the related concepts of America a ‘promised land’ and the ‘American Dream’.

Out of this melting pot came JerUSAlem, a eulogy ‘about America’, “exploring themes such as ‘the American Dream’, freedom of expression, the right to bear arms, Government power and its limits, legitimate and illegitimate protest, racism and crime, JerUSAlem avoids moralising and easy answers, in a frenetic, roller-coaster evocation of the guileless optimism and psychotic glamour of the monstrous and magnificent modern Babylon that is the 21st century USA.” If that reads like a blurb, it’s because it is one. Although the poem is about many things, and too big to reduce to a single-line message, ultimately the poem is a backhanded affirmation of the USA as promised land.

_

GEOMETER: I entirely agree about the unseemly and gratuitous nature of the anti-american feeling that has tended to preoccupy such a broad swathe of popular opinion, which has been incredibly depressing. It’s interesting though because arguably we simultaneously seem to be incredibly interested in these darker Americas – the Nixon years, prohibition, Vietnam. I read an article recently that claimed that the last 8 years, during one of the most reviled presidencies in living memory (more so than Nixon?) had led to a renaissance in American drama, thinking of shows such as The Wire and The Sopranos. Is it the contrast with the ideals of the US that we find interesting?

STEVE ELY: America is everything you want it to be. That’s why it is such a great and fascinating country. The country and party of George Bush and Richard Nixon is also the country and party of Abraham Lincoln. The Presidency of George Bush II was bad, Jesus Christ, but the vehemence of the condemnation of Bush from Europe stems not from a reasoned critique of policy but from a ridiculous and absolutely unfounded assumption of moral and intellectual superiority on the part of cultured Europeans over Philistine Yanks. For all his faults, I’m convinced history will show that Bush was no worse than JFK – a bought election, mob sleaze, Bay of Pigs, Castro assassination plots in cahoots with the mafia, troop escalations and provocations in Indochina, etc, etc. The Haircut has scammed history: he was the James Dean of US politics: he lived fast, died young, left a good looking corpse and a legend far bigger than his achievements merited.

Agree about the quality of US drama, especially when compared to UK shows. For me, UK drama is locked into a patronising relationship with its mass audience; it panders to them, tries to work out what they want and usually decides that is ‘real life’ (not to mention reality) or pantomime – Eastenders, Coronation Street, Hollyoaks. Chuck in a Jane Austen adaptation for ‘quality’. US drama has been superior for a million years and not just the risk-taking, high concept HBO shows you mention: shows like the Simpsons, Futurama, The Shield, NYPD Blue, right back to Cheers, Roseanne, Taxi, Barney Miller, and Hill Street Blues are exponentially better than anything the UK has produced in the same period. Even light-comedy shows like Two and a half Men and That 70s Show are in a different league. What I like about these shows is great plotting, convincing characters, great acting, cracking dialogue, great gags and fast pace. I don’t even think about ‘America’ when I’m watching – except, maybe The Shield, the greatest, most under-rated show of all, LA incarnate.

_

GEOMETER: What were your models for the poem?

STEVE ELY: The Wasteland – a big, ambitious poem with footnotes. Moschiah, Westside Story and Sammy are influenced in style, attitude and to some extent, language, by James Ellroy, particularly American Tabloid. From Ellroy I also took the idea of using historical people as characters in my book. Zion is influenced in language and spirit by the western writer Louis L’Amour, from whose novels I took the narrator, Willliam Tell Sackett. The use of ‘sonnet-like poems’ as stanzas in Westside Story and Sammy I took from my own poetic psychodrama ‘about violence’, Fifty. The Visions of Vicki Weaver is modelled on Biblical apocalyptic literature – The Revelation of St John, The Book of Daniel and the Book of Mormon. Although not models as such, the spirits of Pound’s Cantos and Hughes’ Crow lurk in the background as inspirations – like those two works, JerUSAlem is unlikely and audacious and my growing consciousness of this as the poem developed gave me the inspiration to plough on with it and remain true to my vision, even when everyone was telling me there was no chance of a 20,000 word poem about obscure stuff few people have ever heard about of ever getting published.

_

GEOMETER: re: the lack of scale in poetry. This is interesting. I think Ezra Pound said something like, ‘an epic is a poem that includes history’. As you say, Eliot too wrote on a grand scale, and arguably this fulfilled part of the modernist aesthetic. And yet with both of these figures, they can be seen in some ways to have been way-laid by their material, their ‘history’. I am thinking of Eliot’s anti-semitism, and Pound’s fascism. This is not a question about policing literature, but do you think that ‘history’ conceived in this way, as a kind of raw material, can have pitfalls?

STEVE ELY: I don’t like to keep name-checking my own poetry, but in my poem humanity: was it all worth it? in the compleat eater I reference this issue:

“‘all poets turn fascist in the end’ discuss impounded ezra hawhawed for mussolini yeats in his dotage writing shamrock marching songs ted hughes at the county table with the league of st george the rabble starlings roar on trafalgar for ****s sake ted theyre pigeons UNLESS ITS A METAPHOR doh not apt though AND THEN theres me i grow old i grow old i wear the bottoms of the my trousers rolled and bitter dont forget bitter”

I think there is a certain type of sensibility that can become disillusioned with, for want of a better phrase, ‘the industrial modern world’, because of its bewildering rate of change, its undermining of old certainties, its lowest-common-denominator dumb-ass, popular culture, its destruction of landscape, of ‘heritage’ and hierarchy, and so on. With age in particular, it seems this sensibility can take the form of reaction; Pound (and Yeats to a lesser extent) as you indicate, Eliot not so much in his anti-semitism, which I think was pretty widespread even amongst ‘progressives’ in the first half of the twentieth century, but in his retreat into mysticism and high Anglicanism (Four Quartets). Ted Hughes tobacconist’s-boy-made-good grammar school elitism morphed into county table snobbery and ultimately semi-mystical monarchism when he became laureate.

I don’t necessarily think that it is the utilisation of history as raw material as such that is the problem, but a post ‘60s left/liberal tendency amongst writers and critics that is hyper-sensitive to the exploration of issues such as identity and nationalism in an (British/English) historical context (except from a de-colonising or multicultural point of view) and quick to smear poets that try to engage with these issues with labels like ‘right wing’ or even ‘fascist’. The case of Geoffrey Hill comes to mind. In the wider social context of post war Britain, this is, to some extent understandable. Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, Tory Empire loyalists and extremist parties like the National Front, British Movement and The British National Party have pre-tarnished any attempt to engage with, for example, the English past and make it relevant to a possible English future, (although the re-assertion of Englishness and the reclamation of the Cross of St. George around the multi-ethnic English football team has changed the ground somewhat here). Left wing utilisation of history seems, to the intelligentsia, less problematic, as the case of someone like Bertolt Brecht demonstrates. Great poet as he undoubtedly was, he nevertheless a shill for a murdering totalitarian regime, and in terms of the damage done, far worse than Pound, for example, who in some quarters is spoken of in the same breath as Josef Mengele, yet was no more than a half-baked, quisling rhetorician. Yet Brecht’s reputation is, comparatively speaking, unsullied.

Ultimately, I think writers should say what they have to say, in full knowledge of what it is they’re saying. They should avoid posturing and making provocations for effect, unless they’re prepared to reap the whirlwind. Writers need to be brave enough to go against the grain and risk being misunderstood and misrepresented if that is to be the price of expressing themselves and what they believe to be of value.

_

GEOMETER: As an English writer, it is perhaps surprising (or not?) that the focus of your poem is America. Martin Amis famously said: ‘The project is to become an American novelist.’ What is it about the USA that particularly attracts you, or perhaps rather, do you think you could see yourself writing about the UK in a similar way?

STEVE ELY: I’m currently trying to get started on a similar high concept piece ‘about England’ (not the UK, or Great Britain, or any of those travesties), but I can’t find time/space/stillness/inspiration, so am currently stuck in a cycle of endlessly planning, researching and rehearsing. I am already an American novelist of a kind: my prison thriller San Benito Brother, which I’m currently hawking around agents, is set in California and actually written in American-English. I guess I’m just immersed in American culture. Or maybe it’s more than that. Pace parochialism, America is simply ‘the place’ – during the current period it is the most important and providential nation in the world; why wouldn’t you write about it? I guess during the period 2004-2008, my head just lived in America. Now it’s moved back across the Atlantic.

_

GEOMETER: One British writer who springs to mind who does, is David Peace, whose Red Riding quartet similarly seeks to use history, and events, as its raw material, and by doing so to interrogate its seamier side, to expose and shine a light on its hypocrisies and its evasions. He is sometimes labelled a crime writer, and as well as featuring in JerUSAlem, I know that crime is something that has also interested you. Does crime represent, as many have claimed, an alternative, secret history of our culture? What particular attractions do you think it holds for people?

STEVE ELY: Funny you should mention David Peace. He was born and grew up in Ossett, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, only about 15 miles away from where I live in Upton. In the late 1990s, I really got into James Ellroy and resolved to write UK-based crime fiction modelled on his style and become the ‘English Ellroy’. I began a novel set in Wakefield/Pontefract entitled Punk Mafia and then discovered 1974 and found Peace had got there first – doh! I admire the imaginative force and singular vision that drives Peace’s stuff. And anyone that immortalises the Redbeck Motel in fiction can’t be bad. The Redbeck was a regular stop for me as a youth, walking ten miles home from gigs in Wakefield, having missed the last train home. I once got my face pushed into a belly-buster breakfast at four o’ clock one morning by a tattooed woman from Fitzwilliam I had injudiciously passed negative comment about. I dug out the three chapters of Punk Mafia the other day and they’re not bad; more Elmore Leonard than James Ellroy though. One day, I might finish/rewrite it. The crime fiction and poetry come from very different parts of me, though. The former is primarily storytelling, the latter more concerned with ideas. To answer the second part of your question, I think I know why I’m fascinated by certain types of criminality – it’s the determined extremism, the acting without restraint that characterises certain villains. I think most suburban, buttoned-down, law-abiding types like me sometimes just wish they could tell their boss to **** off/smack a jerk in the mouth/reverse their car over the yob that just threw a beer can at their windscreen. But they don’t. But John Gotti or Frank Fraser would, and to hell with the consequences. That kind of freedom, of absolute truth and loyalty to feeling and principle and utter disregard for situational compromise is what I find compelling.

_

GEOMETER: re: the ‘absolute freedom’ of say a figure such as John Gotti, unconcerned by the consequences of his actions. Do you think this really is freedom, or for want of a better phrase, an instance of ‘bad faith’. In that there is a degree of moral utilitarianism behind such actions, that in many ways is incompatible with freedom in that it inhibits the freedom of others. This comes back to my question about the contradictions inherent in aspects of the American conception of freedom, a confusion that leads on the one hand to the most strident affirmation of the rights of the individual in the form of the US constitution, sitting alongside a nation with one of highest per capita imprisonment (and execution) rates in the world.

STEVE ELY: Not really. Gotti’s freedom came from his membership of La Cosa Nostra, in which he was free to lie, cheat, kill, maim, (etc), with the full support of an organisation of around 3,000 other made guys and associates. The rest of us are just squarejohns, marks, victims. The concept of bad faith essentially depends on the acceptance of the ontological equality of all members of mankind; the mafia doesn’t hold with that. Vis-à-vis the operations of the mob, the rest of us don’t have any rights.

I don’t see a fundamental contradiction between the US concept of individual freedom and high rates of imprisonment and execution, either, although operationally there are any number of shocking anomalies and injustices. Every society has the right to set a direction, draw lines and discipline transgressors. The US choice to incarcerate at such an unprecedented rate is legitimate and popular with the electorate, although you might plausibly argue that voters have been terrified into over-reaction by scaremongering politicians and their big business backers and that groups disproportionately affected by incarceration (ethnic minorities, drug users, criminals themselves) are effectively disenfranchised or have disenfranchised themselves. What is interesting about the rush to imprison offenders in the US is the extent to which ‘prison’ is now in lieu of, or at least an arm of, social welfare; a method of controlling, occupying and warehousing the ‘underclass’. In Germany, for example, a drug abusing unemployed man will receive from the state several hundred euros a week, a free apartment, treatment for his drug abuse and other free services. In the USA, that same man might receive a fifteen year sentence and the state effectively credits the monies that would be spent on his ‘welfare” to a private company in return for his incarceration, from which the company creams a profit. Given that most US prisoners actually work whilst inside, creating a additional profit for the company that owns the prison, it could be argued that US prisons are actually compulsory workhouses. In this view, arbitrary three-strikes-and-out laws and draconian anti-drug laws and sentencing are merely pretexts to take problematic and unproductive citizens off the streets, indenture or enslave them in the service of a privatised profit-making agenda. Whether this is worse than institutionalising social parasitism via promiscuous distribution of taxpayer’s money to wilfully non-productive and often socially destructive people is a matter of debate.

As for execution, I’ve got no problem with that, per se, I don’t see a contradiction between the death penalty and individual freedom. Some people forfeit their right to live due to their actions. In practice freedom must always be operative within a legal framework. The trick is to make the framework as light as possible. The administration of the death penalty in some states is a sick joke though – in 2002, I think, the Governor of Ohio commuted the sentences of all 300 death row prisoners, because so many of the trials were so manifestly flawed. My main objection to the US justice system is a class objection: the system is owned by the rich and structured and weighted so that the rich can commit crimes and get away with them; if you’re poor, you get ****ed over, even to the death and no one’s going into bat for you. It’s a shameful thing.

_

GEOMETER: You are working on a book about a federal prisoner, named Clayton Fountain, who died in 2004. How did this come about, and what attracted you (if ‘attracted’ is the right word) to your subject?

STEVE ELY: I’d been reading about US prisons and prisoners for some time and became fascinated by prison gangs, (especially the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, La Nuestra Familia & the Black Guerilla family) for their unregenerate, ferocious extremism, as well as the fascinating historical and social context from which they emerged. Clayton Fountain was an Aryan Brotherhood associate who can only be described as a force of nature, so relentless and determined was his pursuit of violence; even when kept in solitary confinement and only allowed to leave his cell in handcuffs, supervised by three guards, he managed, on separate occasions, to kill two fellow convicts and a prison guard, and maim God knows how many others. Fountain’s early life was similarly hair-trigger violent and his contempt for authority and sanctions was summarised by one judge who commented that he was ‘wholly beyond the deterrent reach of the law’. From 1984 until his death in 2004, Fountain was kept on no-human-contact status in a specially built Hannibal Lecter-style cell. In 1992, Fountain experienced a profound religious conversion and lived in his cell as an anchorite, eventually becoming accepted by a Cistercian Trappist order as a ‘lay brother’. My research into Fountain is at an advanced stage – I’ve got a pile of documents a foot high via Freedom of Information requests from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the US Marine Corps and I am in contact with several convicts, ex-marines, journalists, monks and academics, who knew Fountain. However, some people that have great information on Clayton are jealously guarding their sources. I need a couple of people to share before I can begin writing in earnest! The book will be a straight biography and an honest attempt to account for such a life.

_

GEOMETER: There is very definitely a religious dimension to your poem. Given the religious culture of the US this is perhaps inevitable. There is very much a sense of the US representing a ‘promised land’ gone bad. However, perhaps even a critique of this nature is itself an instance of religious optimism, insisting as it does on a prelapserian state lurking beneath the surface, if only it can be excavated. I suppose what I would like to ask, is to what degree do you think the figures you represent in the poem become trapped within this conundrum, and whether this causes the cultural contradictions you address in the poem?

STEVE ELY: I think it is arguable that all poetry that aspires to profundity is ultimately religious, or at least plugs in to a dimension that might be called ‘spiritual’. A reading of Ted Hughes’ oeuvre, for example, leads one rapidly to the conclusion that, despite surfaces, Hughes is essentially a devotional poet. I studied the Bible at university and JerUSAlem, like the USA itself, is imbued with Biblical thinking, language and concepts. I don’t think you can really understand the USA without having a concept of how deeply embedded the Bible and Biblically derived concepts (the importance of ‘the Word’, individual responsibility before God, the reality of revelation, the necessity to stand up for what you believe in adversity, the legitimisation of conquest and domination, the inevitability of sin and the real possibility of forgiveness and redemption, etc) are in the American psyche. JerUSAlem explores the idea and ultimately asserts the opinion that the USA is the promised land, but I don’t think a prelapsarian thing is implied; it is certainly not intended. In my view, what makes the USA a great and fateful nation is its assertion of the priority of the right of the reasoning individual, of personal freedom, over and above the rights of the state and ultimately, over everything; the enlightenment transplanted from the context of European autocracy and planted in more fertile soil. To exercise this right of self determination is what it means to be American. The way you exercise that right is your business. Virtually all the major figures in JerUSAlem, in all their dysfunctionality, are quintessentially American in this messianic search for the truth and a better future (Vicki Weaver, Rabbi Schneerson, Sammy Davis Junior, Tim McVeigh, Brigham Young), or in their adherence to codes of conduct that are ‘true and justified’ (Clayton Fountain, Joe Morgan, George Jackson, William Tell Sackett). The USA is the New World, where Ghanaian taxi drivers, Scottish foresters, Korean labourers, Italian chemists, etc, can go and shed the debilitating dross of the Old World and reinvent themselves as lawyers, magnates and movie stars and make a bid for freedom, meaning, prosperity and glory. Some of them make it, many of them don’t. It’s how the cookie crumbles. Along the way we get great and terrible things like Hollywood, TV, rock and roll, the FBI, the Vietnam War, the counter culture, Motown, Guantanamo Bay, the Mafia, Britney Spears, Jim Crow, Los Angeles, the Aryan Nations, supermax prisons, etc. America is a roller coaster – it excites you, amazes you, delights you, terrifies you and sometimes makes you sick. One thing’s for certain though – you want to ride again. Strap in and enjoy!

_

GEOMETER: As well as religion, the poem deals heavily with race. Indeed, when the Vicki Weaver segment of the poem first appeared in Geometer it drew comments from members of various white supremacist groups in the US. Was this difficult to deal with in the poem?

STEVE ELY: Yes. In JerUSAlem, not only do I deal with race and racism as a major theme, but I do so via racist characters and narrators. I also treat sympathetically or without judging some characters that hold/held extremely unpleasant racial views (Vicki Weaver, for example). This has been off-putting to some readers: some have been empathetic towards my intentions but are just uncomfortable with words like ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’. Others have suggested that my treatment of race and use of racial language in JerUSAlem implies that I myself am racist, which is untrue and perhaps cause to take it outside – unlike at lot of armchair liberals and PC language police, I’ve been involved in anti-racist politics for much of my life and not passively either. I’ve got the scars to prove it. In JerUSAlem I deal with racism in a very considered way. I conceived of the narrator of Moshiach, for example, as ‘Brooklyn everyman’, the kind of mouthy, opinionated guy you might meet in a bar who would use racial epithets in his war stories but justify them by saying, ‘Me, racist? I’m just a street guy, that’s just the words we use about each other,’ or, ‘I’m not prejudiced, I insult everybody, peckerwoods, guineas, slopes, towelheads …” etc. I needed a narrator like this because I wanted to open the poem with a bang, using a fictionalised version of the 1991 Crown Heights race-riot as a hyperbolic metaphor for the state of US race relations. Vicki Weaver gets a platform because the main message of that poem is that it is wrong to justify the persecution and murder of people simply because they hold beliefs you find offensive. Freedom of speech is for everyone, or it is not freedom of speech at all. If you read the whole poem, it’s blindingly obvious that the message of the poem is affirmatory and anti-racist. I make Sammy Davis Junior God, for Sam’s sake! Tom Metzger, the former Klansman and founder of White Aryan Resistance must have stumbled across The Visions of Vicki Weaver on Geometer in an internet search. He left the message ‘Lon is not forgotten’ (Lon Horiuchi was the FBI sniper who murdered Vicki Weaver) and a link to his website. I was surprised and a bit taken aback that he’d found my poem and commented on it, but ultimately pleased. Poems need readers. Society needs dialogue and engagement.